"People in quite similar cultures are using music for different reasons from one another," says North.

While researchers often study how musical taste varies between individuals and social groups, North and Davidson wanted to see how musical preferences differed across cultures.

"You only have to turn on the radio as you travel around the world to see that musical tastes do differ between different cultures," says North.

In the largest study of its kind, the researchers surveyed nearly 29,000 people from North America, Scandinavia, UK and Ireland, France and Germany, and Australia and New Zealand.

North and Davidson found that when asked about 104 different music styles, survey respondents in most of the five regions of the world showed a clear preference for certain styles, quite independent from education and employment.

North Americans for example liked classical music most, whereas this was least popular in France and Germany, where much of this music comes from.

While Scandinavians liked rock over rebellious music, France and Germany preferred it the other way around.

Interestingly, while Australian and New Zealanders seemed to like all styles pretty equally, they gave jazz a higher rating than respondents from the other regions.

Mood management

North and Davidson also probed why people were listening to music.

They found that overall, pure enjoyment was a relatively unimportant reason.

North says the main reason people were listening to music was for mood management, to help deal with tension and other difficulties, to reduce loneliness and alleviate boredom.

"It's almost like using music as an emotional bandaid," he says. "It's using music to help you get through the day."

Aside from this, when the five world regions were compared, Australia and New Zealanders were most likely to listen to music to please friends, be fashionable, or create an image for themselves.

"People in Australia and New Zealand were most likely to use music to create an impression with other people," says North. North America, and UK and Ireland, by contrast, scored low on this reason.

Explanations

North says it makes sense that people in different cultures use music for different reasons, but at this stage it is unclear what about each culture explains the trends seen in the survey.

Much has been made about the role of individualist and collectivist cultures in explaining human behaviour, but this does not explain the findings across the five regions, he says.

"With the exception of Scandinavia they are all strongly individualistic cultures, but none the less we still found differences between them in the ways in which people are using music."

North says further research comparing musical preferences across cultures will probe the role of other cultural characteristics in shaping music preferences.

For example, he says some cultures are more masculine than feminine and he would be "amazed" if this did not explain a preference for heavy rock over ballads in some cultures.

Other cultures like to avoid uncertainty and this is likely to result in a preference for established superstars and make it harder for new acts to break through, says North.

Music for the market

Understanding what music people like and why they like it is important for those who sell music, says North, who has previously consulted for the music industry and in-store music providers.

For example, he says, if a goth rock artist knows their fans are using music to form a social group, then they should sell T-shirts cheaply because they know their fans will become walking advertisements.

Alternatively, says North, if people are buying music for mood management, then the music needs to be gentle with strong emotional lyrics that are printed on the sleeve of the CD so they can be thought about.

"It's just a case of giving the market what it's asking for," he says.